Nonword Repetition with Spectrally Reduced Speech: Some Developmental and Clinical Findings from Pediatric Cochlear Implantation

Abstract

Nonword repetition skills were examined in 24 pediatric cochlear implant (CI) users and 18 normal-hearing (NH) adult listeners listening through a CI simulator. Two separate groups of NH adult listeners assigned accuracy ratings to the nonword responses of the pediatric CI users and the NH adult speakers. Overall, the nonword repetitions of children using CIs were rated as more accurate than the nonword repetitions of the adults. The nonword repetition accuracy ratings from both groups of subjects were correlated with open-and closed-set word recognition scores and forward digit spans. Only the perceptual accuracy scores from pediatric CI users were correlated with measures of speech production accuracy. These results suggest that although the pediatric CI users had more experience and success in perceiving speech under degraded auditory conditions, developmental differences in their memory skills prevent them from performing as well on working memory tasks as mature listeners.For over a decade, nonword repetition has been a popular task used to assess phonological working memory in a wide range of developmental and clinical popula-

The Impact of Feedback Frequency on Performance in a Novel Speech Motor Learning Task

“…The nonword stimuli were produced by a female native English speaker who was a trained linguist. Stimuli were recorded, amplitude-normalized to 65 dB, and digitized using Praat software (Boersma & Weenink, 2014). Primary stress was placed on the first syllable, and secondary stress was placed on the third syllable.…”

“…Therefore, each participant completed the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test (PPVT-4; Form A; Dunn & Dunn, 2007) as a measure of receptive vocabulary to determine whether this correlated with individual differences in performance, as well as a digit span task (forward and backward) and the Corsi block span task (forward and backward) to assess verbal and nonverbal visuospatial working memory, respectively. Both forward and backward spans were collected because the forward span tests immediate recall and short-term memory, whereas the backward span is thought to target working memory (Burkholder-Juhasz, Levi, Dillon, & Pisoni, 2007). The participants' articulation and phonological skills, phonological working memory, and perception of nonword sequences were also assessed using alternate motion rates and the Nonword Repetition Test (Dollaghan & Campbell, 1998;Lisman & Sadagopan, 2013), because underlying speech motor planning and execution abilities may influence performance on the nonword production task in this study (Sasisekaran et al, 2010).…”

“…Durations of the target nonwords and clusters were measured on the basis of waveforms and wide-band spectrograms in Praat (Boersma & Weenink, 2014).…”

Effects of real-time cochlear implant simulation on speech production

“…Loebach and Pisoni, 2008;Smalt et al, 2013) or the degradation of spectral information introduced by the simulation itself Fu et al, 1998a;Shannon et al, 1995). Accordingly, research using the CI simulation method has been far-ranging and prolific, studying such phenomena as speech perception accuracy in quiet, noise, and babble (Cullington and Zeng, 2008;Fu et al, 1998a), accuracy of environmental sound recognition (Loebach and Pisoni, 2008;Shafiro, 2008), listeners' ability to repeat novel word forms (Burkholder-Juhasz et al, 2007), the effects of target language on speech recognition (e.g., Fu et al, 1998b), the influence of particular signal processing algorithms (e.g., Fu et al, 1998a), the benefits of additional frequency channels or electrodes (Shannon et al, 1995), and the effectiveness of different training methods for promoting perceptual learning (Loebach and Pisoni, 2008;Loebach et al, 2010).…”

Reconhecimento de palavras, nomeação de figuras e de palavras impressas em surdos implantados pré-linguais

“…O estudo conduzido por Burkholder-juhasz, Levi, Dillon e Pisoni (2007) comportamento emitido pelo ouvinte é reforçado pelo comportamento do falante. Por exemplo, quando é contado algo ao ouvinte, a sua reação é mantida pelo fato de que, em situações semelhantes, quando o ouvinte reagiu de tal maneira a uma fala como aquela vinda do falante, teve seu comportamento reforçado.…”